Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Walter watches me go. Pea is saying something to Tamara, her back trembling with laughter.

  The snow has stopped, but the wind kicks up the drifts. Ice stings my cheeks. It takes three tries to get my cigarette to catch. The light from inside the house is warm. Spilled generously, like their laughter. I shiver in a beaver coat and a wedding suit. I think about my daughter, asleep in Pea’s womb, but dreaming. Durga, child of a family I have nearly lost.

  Inside, Tamara cackles with laughter. “Walter, why don’t you try dancing with a ten-foot python and tell me how easy it is!”

  A pause while everyone considers and discards the easy joke.

  My hands feel sluggish and rigid with tension. A river runs through them, wide enough for many bodies and very cold. It is a river of threats that has crossed an ocean to reach me. Men with bullets and men with tanks and men with bombs and men with sorrow in their hearts, who only want to go home.

  There is the matter of a curse. I know she has not forgotten it. I hope she doesn’t believe in it. You will never have a moment’s peace. You will regret the day you ever met this—

  I smoke the cigarette down, drop it into the snow. I am smiling.

  Just you and me, my diamond-headed baby, here at the end. You got something big to say, I know it. But what good has knowing our future ever done us? Should we struggle away from it? Or should I just turn your face to the table, easy, easy, and let our troubled hands play out?

  * * *

  The car began to drift off the road. Tamara grabbed the wheel, screaming.

  “Stop the car, Pea, dammit, brake the fucking car!”

  At least Phyllis’s feet still belonged to her will. She braked while Tamara pulled them onto the narrow shoulder.

  Phyllis, whose hands had at last been returned to her, fumbled with the door handle and then collapsed outside, on her knees on the frozen tarmac. She started to vomit but did not dare touch her hands to her own face. After a moment, Tamara was beside her, a warm arm and a safe voice taking her back around to the car.

  “Just go to sleep, sugar,” Tamara said, because she had promised herself—Phyllis needed taking care of, even if Dev hadn’t said so. “It’s over now.”

  Tamara’s hands had never touched a dream as it passed through them. But she knew dreams, nevertheless, as an oracle does—from above, from the numbers. She thought of what the cards had shown her just before they left the city: sixes and kings, death and deadly battle.

  She and Phyllis were going to ground in a house in the country. Their ghosts had followed them as surely as their lovers had left them, but there was always more than one front in war.

  For a moment, Tamara possessed, though she did not know it, the look of a soldier.

  THEY

  WALKED IN

  THE LIGHT

  1

  “When this war is over, sugar, I’m going to Paris. And I won’t dance, either—not like before, anyway. A cabaret on the Left Bank, that’s where I’ll go, and I’ll sing in French—”

  A dry voice from the back seat. “Tammy, you don’t speak a word of French.”

  Tamara—the recently retired snake dancer notorious of a West Village gin joint, raised her chin. “Bonjour, comment allez-vous, voulez-vous coucher avec moi—”

  Her companion and passenger clapped her hands. “Hope you aren’t planning on saying that to everyone you meet!”

  The driver, erstwhile snake dancer, solidly Francophile if not—yet—Francophone, tried to level a quelling glare at the tired, light-skinned face in the rearview mirror, but cracked.

  “Let’s see how good you do, then!” she laughed.

  The woman in the back—four months pregnant, recently retired hatchet girl notorious of a West Village mob racket—was smiling. In a humorous, surgical tone that always anchored Tamara’s memories of her, the woman said, “But I am not attempting to repeat the successes of the great Miss Baker.”

  Tamara smiled into the mirror but kept her eyes on the road. “I will, you watch me, Phyllis Green. I’m sick of up north, sick of the damned cold. In Paris the Seine is made of lights and champagne. Here, what do we have? The Hudson? A stinking mud hole in summer, an ice floe in winter, and nothing on the other side but New fucking Jersey.”

  Phyllis Green—lately Patil, though she was taking her time with the paperwork—sighed and leaned back against the camel-brown velvet seats. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  The car, a respectable 1936 Dodge sedan, did not belong to either of them, but they had claimed it, as they had claimed each other. The owner, after all, was busy driving ambulances somewhere in the hell of the European front. A little goddess on the dashboard, a brass divinity with ten arms and a skirt of hands, was a reminder of him, though there were others. Phyllis pressed her face into the upholstery, which still smelled a little of the owner’s cigarettes and the cologne he would wear on police business—though she had never made that connection. She drooled as she dozed, and smiled as though she could hear him through a line. Tamara noted this, and then looked quickly away.

  They stopped at a gas station just outside of Rhinebeck, and Tamara waited outside in the cold while Phyllis used the ladies’ room. The attendant, a boy who put her in mind of succotash, with his carrot-red hair and string bean–green jumpsuit, frowned at them. He looked back at the older man in the cashier’s booth, wondering, Tamara was sure, if the presence of at least one Negro woman in the only gas station for forty miles merited notifying management. Tamara raised her head and then, remembering, lowered it again. She studied her boots, dark yellow, hand-tooled Italian leather, probably cost more than anyone in this pit-stop town could imagine making in a year—but then, she had learned early that there wasn’t money in the world green enough to make up for black skin in a white man’s eyes. If she were back in the Pelican, she would have glared, she would have dared that white boy to say a damn word. But they were upstate now, far from the relative safety of Walter’s gang, and Tamara Anderson knew how to survive.

  “You gonna go for the change, kid?” she asked when he just stared between her and the closed bathroom door and back up at the cashier.

  His eyes snapped back to her and he wrinkled his nose. “I’ll give it to your missus when she comes out.”

  Her skin flushed and her breath got choppy. The nerve of this boy—if he knew the weight she had behind her, all the smiles she’d faked and truth she’d hidden to keep it there—the words were out before she could snatch them back: “Missus?” she said, wide-eyed. “Oh, but she’s my sister.”

  The boy jerked back, surprised. He stared at Phyllis when she left the bathroom, a little paler than usual, but unmistakable nonetheless when you knew what to look for. She closed her eyes briefly and put a steadying hand against the wall. Worry flashed through Tamara, chased with remorse. The doctor had said she needed rest. And here Tamara was, playing more games?

  “What you staring at, kid?” Pea asked, wearily.

  The kid closed a tight fist over the bills and stammered. “You-you best be off. They—we—don’t let you folk stay past sundown.”

  Phyllis pulled back her shoulders and touched the knife holster beneath her mink coat. She hadn’t been passing on purpose, but they had both known a certain ambiguity would make this necessary gas stop safer. And it would have worked.

  Phyllis did not bother to respond. They had known the danger of taking this road; the white folks up here had certain notions of “racial purity” and reputations for their methods of maintaining it. At the driver’s-side door, Phyllis held out her hand and, after a hesitation brief enough that it shamed her, Tamara handed the keys over. They were in danger now; no matter what the doctor said, they needed to get out of town on the double. As they got into the car, the boy went to talk to the cashier, and their whispers slid along the cold earth like snakes. Phyllis gave her friend a small, fortifying kind of smile, and Tamara managed to take a full breath.

  Phyllis turned onto US 9, sliding behind a flatbed loaded dow
n with shorn logs and icicles that occasionally wobbled and smashed in the narrow gap between them. Not long after, a blue pickup that they both recognized from the gas station pulled up close to their bumper. Tamara cursed.

  “We pay them, and those ofays decide to chase us anyway? Goddamn it, Pea, I left Virginia because of the damn lynch mobs.”

  “Those fools? They ain’t even a lynch two-man show. Some stooges in a rust bucket who are about to get left in our dust, that’s all they are. Now, you hold on, Tammy—”

  This was all the warning Tamara had before Pea swerved hard to the left and pressed the gas pedal directly to the floor. Dev had kept his old Dodge in good condition; the motor roared to meet the challenge and they shot forward. The flatbed truck was a blur in Tamara’s passenger-side window, and Pea slid in front of it just before they hit a curve.

  “Goddamn it,” Tamara said, still gripping the door in a death vise, though Pea was slowly easing the gas. “Goddamn it,” she repeated.

  Phyllis shook her head. “Hysterics later, Tammy. Keep watch.”

  Tammy took a breath and swiveled to look out the back window. The pickup was playing peek-a-boo with the flatbed, but it couldn’t get up enough speed to pass it before a car came in the other direction.

  “Cletus and Junior C are still gunning for us.”

  “I hope not literally.”

  “Oh, Christ. Why are we going upstate again?”

  “Little Easton isn’t a sundown town.”

  “Yet,” Tamara muttered.

  Phyllis gave a bleak laugh. “The house is on a hill. At least we can see them coming.”

  “That’s mighty comforting, Pea.”

  Phyllis kept laughing. Tamara, watching her, thought she might just cry.

  You are ten kinds of fool, Tamara Anderson, she was telling herself. You are a fool made to teach other fools how to do their business. You are out here alone on the road with Pea, and instead of resting in the back seat like the doctor told her, she’s driving the getaway car while you keep the lookout on a pair of murderous gas station attendants.

  “You fool,” she muttered. They weren’t at the Pelican anymore. She didn’t have Victor to protect her when she played those kinds of games. That silver bastard was dead, and this woman beside her had done everything but plant the knife in his skull.

  “What’s that?” Pea asked, her voice bright and ready, as though she could think of no greater fun than hot-tailing it out of a sundown town in a sweet ride, with her best friend by her side.

  “Just laying blame where it’s due.” Tammy laughed a little, surprising herself. All she had ever wanted was to be safe. But here she was, cross-grain to all of her comfortable grooves. Here she was, about to die in a fiery wreck on US 9. Damn Phyllis—why had Victor’s bloody knife finally gotten it into her head to try to be good? Hadn’t they been comfortable all those high-flying years at the Pelican? Two queens, hearts and spades, flanking Victor’s diamond king? Well, she wasn’t about to confess what she’d done—no need to show all her cards.

  The pickup did its little dance from behind the flatbed again. This time, it got some speed on the straightaway, its lights bright and malevolent in the folding gray evening.

  “Pea,” Tammy said, urgently, “Pea, could you give us a little more gas? I think they’re gonna—”

  Two deer, healthy bucks, darted into the road behind them. The truck slammed on the brakes, and the truck bed jackknifed against the cab. One of the deer made it to safety, but the other flew over the truck cab and crashed through the windshield of the old pickup. It spiraled out of control and slammed into the long end of the wide-bed.

  The silence that followed could have cut glass. Pea pulled to the shoulder, turned off the engine.

  “Should we check…?”

  Heart pounding, Tammy lifted her eyes to the rearview mirror.

  The flatbed was smoking and quiet on the highway. But that wasn’t what grabbed her attention. In the back seat, she saw the top of a slate-gray head, parted with an edge like a razor and slicked with grease.

  Tamara choked on her own spit and spun around—but the seat was empty. Phyllis clapped her on the back as she coughed and coughed.

  “What is it?”

  “Vic—Victor—I swear, Pea, I swear I saw his hair in the mirror—”

  She turned to the empty seat, and looked back at Tammy. “Like hell.”

  Tamara reached into her purse and pulled out a silver flask. “I ain’t joking!”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “He’s gone now.”

  “What? His ghost? You can’t be serious.”

  “Well, we all knew he used that juju, don’t we? That he stole all those hands? What’s to say he couldn’t find a way to haunt us?” What’s to say he couldn’t have come back to save her? The thought ought to have been comforting, but it left her queasy. She took a slug of bourbon.

  Phyllis gave Tamara a long look and turned the engine. She pulled them back onto the road. “Well, if he’s back,” said Phyllis, “I’ll just find a way to kill him again.”

  This was—though there was no way for either of them to know it—an unwise thing to say. Phyllis’s hands, so beguilingly quiescent these past few weeks, flexed entirely of their own accord and moved to grasp the knives in her holster. Phyllis gasped, but she could no more control them than she could kill a ghost.

  They stopped it, this time. Tamara did not feel reassured. She drove the rest of the way, checking the mirror every thirty seconds. But she would not turn back—Tamara wouldn’t make that mistake a second time. In the stories of the dead, that’s what they said—if you heard something while crossing that river, you kept your eyes on that promised by-and-by. If you turned around, they would keep you. If you turned around, your eyes would fill with smoke and you weren’t never coming home.

  2

  The women arrived at dusk, with flurries of snow brushing the frozen driveway up on the hill. The wind gave it an impression of shape, a smear of motion and form that lingered in their sight long after the flakes had bowed and risen and scattered. Phyllis stared in silence at the red front door, the trellis covered in sleeping vines. After a minute, the door opened.

  The woman on the threshold was white, just a few years shy of what Tamara felt she could reasonably call “old,” but she projected age, nonetheless—a querulous disdain that some white women equated with dignity.

  “Sweet Jesus,” whispered Phyllis. “Why didn’t Dev tell us Mrs. Grundy was white?”

  “I don’t think he ever met her,” Tamara whispered back. “She answered the ad in the Gazette.”

  Phyllis closed her eyes. The woman in the door tapped her foot.

  “Get in, then! You’re letting in the cold.”

  “Right,” Phyllis said, laughing a little. “You deal with her.”

  “Me? You’re the fancy lady of the house.”

  “I don’t do fancy anymore,” Phyllis said. “Besides, I want to check the garden.”

  The garden was a strip of charred earth littered with chunks of ice like dirty meteorites. Even the rosebushes had been reduced to a series of crooked spindles, dark gray against the lighter gray of the house’s faded whitewash. Phyllis tramped through them in her city boots and Tamara cursed her under her breath before climbing the stairs. She held out her gloved hand. Mrs. Grundy looked at it like a very worthy specimen at the museum.

  “And your friend?” she said. She had a funny accent—straight and clipped, like Tamara’s own white-people voice. Rich white people generally spoke whichever way they wanted, so perhaps she and this newspaper-ad housekeeper shared a certain experience of judgment. Still, Tamara put her gloved hand back in her coat pocket, unshook.

  “She won’t be long,” Tamara said faintly.

  Phyllis walked through the naked roses, removing the spines gently when the branches snagged on her coat. Her movements were angular but not rigid, what Tamara would have labeled a Graham method–inflected Bauhaus style, we
re she still the mistress of the Pelican’s off-nights, a student of the modern arts.

  But she wasn’t, not anymore. Now Tammy was just a girl with an old deck of playing cards in her right pocket and her heart in her throat.

  Phyllis moved in a kind of prayer, a ritual invocation of the dead or sleeping earth, of the powers that saw fit to touch her and touch her baby, of the cruelty felt in the palm of the Lord, and his beauty. There was death in that dance, defiance and fear.

  She knelt between the two tallest bushes and dug her naked hands in the dirt. Her mouth moved, but neither Tamara nor the housekeeper could hear her over the wind and the river. In any case, Tamara might have guessed—Phyllis was speaking to the man she had married just one month before out here in the snow, full knowing they might never see one another again. Dev had told her to sprinkle his ashes in the garden.

  Phyllis hiked up her heavy woolen houndstooth skirt just high enough to reveal the green hilt of the knife strapped to her thick silk hose. The housekeeper gasped, but did not in fact speak—an interesting datum that Tamara might have noted if not for what her friend did next.

  Phyllis threw her knife high in the air, caught it and slammed it into the earth. The two larger knives in her holster followed half a second later, marking the bottom vertices of a long triangle.

  “Pea, are you—”

  “I wasn’t told about any weapons on the—”

  “Stop, damn you! Damn you! Oh, Christ almighty, please…”

  Phyllis twisted and jerked, a rag doll struggling against the living hands at the ends of her arms. She threw herself down, her torso tangled in the thorns of the roses. When she lunged again for the three green hilts that marked the resting places of her knives, her fur coat remained stuck fast in the branches. Her face was wet with tears and mucus and her throat burning with curses. When her arms moved again Phyllis uprooted part of the plant. It wouldn’t survive.